Raymond's mind was turning more and more to a set scene with McComas; some meeting between them was, to his notion, a _scene a faire_. It seemed demanded by a Gallic sense of form: it must be gone through with as a requisite to his role of offended husband. One difficulty was that Raymond fluctuated daily, almost hourly, in his view of his wife--of _the_ wife, I may say. To-day he took the old view: the wife was her husband's property and any attempt on her was a deadly injury to him. To-morrow he took the newer view: the wife was an individual human being and a free moral agent; therefore a lapse, while it meant disgrace for her, was, for him, but an affront which he must endure with dignified composure. Meanwhile the pair saw little of each other, and Albert, puzzled, began to enter upon his opportunity (a wide and lingering one it became) for learning adjustment to awkward and disconcerting conditions. Well, Raymond had his meeting. Imagine whether it was agreeable. Imagine whether it was agreeable to me, in whose office it was held. Raymond had the difficult part of one who must act because he has deliberately committed himself to action, yet has no sure ground to act upon, and therefore no line to take with real effect. It was here and now that McComas turned his round face foursquare to his uncertain accuser, and let loose a steady, unspeaking stare from those hard blue eyes, and declared that nothing had occurred upon which an accusation could justly be based. He was emphatic; and he was blunt; the son and grandson of a rustic. Nothing, he said. Had there really been nothing? You are entitled to ask. And I might be inclined to answer, if I knew. I simply don't. I was in position to know something, to know much; but everything?--no. Think, if you please, of the many domestic situations which must pass without the full light of detailed knowledge--knowledge that comes too late, or never comes at all. Consider the simple, willful girl who marries impulsively on the assumption that the new acquaintance is a bachelor. Cases have been known where it developed that he was not. Consider the phrase of the marriage service, "if any of you know just cause or impediment": who can declare that, in a given instance, some impediment, moral if not legal, might not be brought against either contracting party, however trustful the other? Consider the story of the anxious American mother who, alarmed by reports about a fascinating scoundrel under whom her daughter was studying music somewhere in mid-Europe, went abroad alone to investigate. Her letter to the awaiting father, back home, ran for page after page on non-essentials and dealt with the real point only in a brief, embarrassed, bewildered postscript of one line: "Oh, William, _I don't know_!" Neither do I "know." But my account of later events may help you to decide the question for yourselves.